If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

I just realized that I should have probably specified that it is not hiding the file system but hiding the partition from windows so that it does not show up as drive D: - b/c anytime a program goes to open drive D: it prompts the good old question "Do you want to format drive D:\?" And I can't have anyone else or even myself clicking format.

I do see with grub there is a hide command. I was wondering what this does, and if/how I can use it?

Run fdisk (from linux) and check the partition's
ID number. You may get a clue there.
Windows shouldn't see it if it is linux native, type 83
It's possible that linux could format and use the
partition succesfully, but it is flagged in the partition
table as a FAT partition (even though you actually
have an ext3 filesystem on it)

I believe 83 is actually ext2, not ext3, but that is beside the point. Although if you go to ext3, that may solve your problem. I also thought that extended was type 0F (hex) and fat 32 (your primary) is type 0B. Not sure what 0C and 05 are....

Anyway, I have never seen any linux partion show up in windows, unless it was on another computer and mapped with Samba. There almost has to be something wrong with your boot loader to do this. If you have a boot disk, I would be tempted to fdisk /mbr in dos, boot to linux with the disk, and reinstall grub or lilo or whatever you want to use...

I wrote ext3 because thats what it is formated as. Fdisk lists 0C as "FAT32 LBA" and type 05 as extended, for type 83 it just says linux so I assume both ext2 and ext3 use type 83 (I know for sure b/c when I upgraded my kernel I forgot to add ext3 support and it wouldn't boot the new kernel).

I did once re-install lilo and that solved my problem , but then when I changed to grub it happened again. I am kinda tempted to fdisk mbr and re-install grub, but my last experiance with that I accedently installed it to hda1 (long story) and overwrote my Windows boot (by that I found out that sector 6 of my Win partition was a backup of sector 0 so I just copied sector 6 over sector 0 and booted up again). But if there are no other suggestions I might just do it- and I'll be careful not to do anything stupid this time. Thanks